The league is expected to announce this week that Jerome Boger, an N.F.L. referee for seven years, will lead the crew of officials here Sunday. Historically, that means Boger scored the highest among referees during the standard postgame evaluations â€” a notion that some observers and, privately, several other on-field officials find hard to comprehend.

â€œWhatâ€™s happening right now is that the best officials are not working the best games,â€ said Jim Daopoulos, who worked 11 years as an on-field official and 12 years as a supervisor of officials before becoming an officiating analyst for NBC. Daopoulos added that he believed that the grading of some officials, including Boger, was altered because the league had a predetermined assignment in mind.

"Although it is not clear which grades were changed, Boger did have some unusual moments this season, most notably a sequence in Week 16 when he announced a penalty against Carolina quarterback Cam Newton for “bumping” him while protesting the officiating but did not eject Newton, as the rules require. Boger later said that he misspoke and that the penalty against Newton was only for “disrespectfully addressing” an official."

Sounds like Howard doing a backpedal on Lena Dunham. If they were going to go with a black ref, they should have let Mike Carey do another game.

Did you see the old bla African-American ref who blew up a screen pass over the middle for some team during conference championship week? He just couldn't get out of the way fast enough. It's like he was the 12th man on defense; stopped that shit cold, and he looked all defiant afterwards with his old man glasses and whatnot.

And we're not even a full season removed from the replacement refs debacle.